Welcome to Woke Headline Day

OPINION

SAN ANGELO, TX – Welcome to Woke Headline Day at San Angelo Live!  

Why Woke?  Live! is constantly being criticized or praised for its attention grabbing headlines and a lot of the criticism is that the headlines are click bate or over sensationalized or even racist. 

There are very specific reasons for how headlines are written and we'll get to that in a bit.  

First – what is Woke?  According to Wikipedia, "Woke is a political term that originated in the United States, and it refers to a perceived awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial justice.^[1] It derives from the African-American Vernacular English expression "stay woke", whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues."

Social Justice or Racial Justice and a continuing awareness of those issues.  Today, Live! will strive to publish only headlines which are sensitive to social justice and racial justice. 

Regular readers may remember we had a Boring Headline Day last year.  The headlines that day received hundreds of comments because the headlines were so different from what Live! normally publishes. 

In the past Live! has been criticized for using terms like Illegal Alien.  Woke readers find that both socially and racially insensitive. The fact is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection consistently uses Illegal Alien to describe a person who is in the United States illegally.  Social Justice warriors argue that it is not a Woke term.  

Live! has also been criticized for using slang terms for marijuana such as weed, reefer, and the one which garners the most criticism, the Devil's Lettuce.  The fact is that search engines line Google flag the word marijuana which hides the article from you so we use a list of terms straight from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to avoid being flagged by Google.  

Another example of Live! being censored by Google is terms like 'Sexual Assault of a Child' or even 'Sexual Assault.'  Live! avoids being censored by substituting 'Lewd Acts with a Child' or 'Assault of a Minor.'

People today are constantly on their smart phones or laptops scrolling through thousands of posts on social media and on the web.  Our job is to get your attention; to get you to stop scrolling and read our articles.  that's why we have to be more creative that the next guy to draw you to our work and read our articles.  

So, welcome to Woke Headline Day and happy scrolling!  

Thanks for reading!